“I say, isn’t this taking a chance?” asked Peter, a little worried and a little out of breath, as he clambered up beside me.
“It’s glorious!” I retorted, with a nod toward the slowly paling sky-line.
That far and lonely horizon looked as though a fire of molten gold burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out over empty space.
“I find,” he observed, “that this tower was sold to a tenderfoot, by the foot. That’s why it went over. It was too highfalutin! It was thirty feet taller than it had any need to be.”
Then he dropped back into silence.
I finally became conscious of the fact that Peter, instead of staring at the sunset, was staring at me. And I remembered that my hair was half down, trailing across my nose, and that three distinctly new freckles had shown themselves that week on the bridge of that same nose.
“O God, but you’re lovely!” he said in a half-smothered and shamefaced sort of whisper.
“Verboten!” I reminded him. “And not so much the cussing, Peter, as the useless compliments.”
He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring out over the twilight prairie for quite a long time. When he spoke again it was in a quieter and much more serious tone.
“I suppose I may as well tell you,” he said without looking at me, “that I’ve come into a pretty clear understanding of the situation here at Alabama Ranch.”